As social media marketers and brand leaders, our time is our most valuable resource. Once we are in a steady groove of content planning and production, the next decision is knowing when the best time to post on social media actually is. The platforms themselves offer best practices for when your audience is likely to be online, which seems like the perfect silver bullet: post when the most people are on so they see your content!
But if globally, even as an average, everybody’s timing looks approximately like this:
What is the best time to post on social media in 2024?
To be blunt, you are fully welcome to go down the rabbit hole of big data, find a whole suite of fancy tracking and data mining tools, and use them to comb through millions of data points. What you’ll likely end up with will mirror the chart above:
→ Folks are online and check their social first thing in the morning, after breakfast as they’re settling into work or daytime routine
→ They’ll pop back in around lunchtime where engagement will tail off over the afternoon
→ Right after dinner there might be a bump in activity
→ Once bedtime hits, things pretty much close up for the night
→ REPEAT
Weekends may look a bit different since most people aren’t tied to their desks, and so check in on their phone in between events throughout the day.
So, if broadly speaking, those trends hold across all platforms across the entire earth, is it even possible to figure out the best time to post for your business?
Yes, but it’s going to require some thinking about YOUR target audience.
Think about your own target market to find the best time to post
When we teach content strategy inside Strong Brand Social Club, we talk about the necessity of needing to know about a day in the life of our ideal customer:
→ Who are the following?
→ How are they consuming content?
→ Are they on social all day?
→ Are they only using social media in between other moments?
→ When they check social, is it fleeting, or long haul scroll sessions?
→ Is it only in the middle of the night?
In order to truly meet our target customer where they are, we need to know these things.
And I know what you’re thinking, “But how am I supposed to know these things?”
Here’s what you can do to answer these questions for YOUR ideal customer:
Go for a walk and think about your best customer, your truly perfect customer who loves you and your work, use your imagination, and think about every possible well-educated assumption you can about them and write them down!
Like Atticus Finch said in To Kill a Mockingbird, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… until you climb in his skin and walk around in it.”
Take a walk, a real one, outside if you can, and have a think about what their day looks like and feels like.
Once you’re back inside, write things down from dawn ‘til dusk and see what you’ve got. More than any tool, considering these specifics and nuances for YOUR audience will reveal the best times to post on social media, based on the gaps and moments in their day where you can serve them through your content and messaging.
And even more good news? If you’ve ever wondered how big-hearted brands build out all the pieces and parts of their content strategy in ways that are simple, sustainable, and powerful…
